turtledovefandomcom-20200216-history
Talk:Andrew Johnson
Yes, Johnson was governor of a state (Tennessee) but he was not Governor of Tennessee in the way we understand it: He was not elected, and he did not draw his authority from the state Constitution. He was administrator of the state under martial law--a military governor. It was hoped that Tennessee Tories would flock to one of their own and get the government under the constitution Congress had approved when Tennessee was accepted into the Union up and running again; but that government was not running during Johnson's governorship. Turtle Fan 03:55, 13 January 2009 (UTC) :Andrew Johnson, Sam Houston, Mack Leaming, William Bradford, Theodorick Bradford, John Young, one other Fort Pillow character whose name escapes me (Forrest and his underlings are talking about all the things Bradford has to answer for, and someone mentions a raid and is told "No, that was Major X, who is the commander of another regiment of Tennessee Tories") will soon be joined by George Thomas, an ATL version of Robert E. Lee, and whomever else appears in LatA to give us a fairly sizable foundation for a Southern Unionists category, if anyone's interested. There may even be someone we can shake loose from a reread of GotS, which I keep meaning to do one of these days. Turtle Fan 20:49, August 24, 2011 (UTC) :Oh, and possibly James Longstreet, too; I once read a book that made the case that Confederate veterans who aligned themselves with the GOP during Reconstruction should count as unionists. Not sure I buy it myself. For some reason I thought we had an article on Philip Cooke, but we don't. (We do have an article on Jeb Stuart Jr., who was christened as Philip St George Cooke Stuart before Cooke and Stuart became estranged. If it's the historical Jeb Stuart Jr, that is.) Turtle Fan 20:55, August 24, 2011 (UTC) Soldiers of the Second American Revolution We do not have him listed as a "Soldier of the American Civil War" so I do not believe he should be listed under the ATL soldier cats either. I believe Jonathan included him here because he was an OTL Military Governor but will let him explain why. ML4E (talk) Military Governor it is. When I was young I read a Civil War guidebook which classified him as a "Union General" for that reason.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 19:01, February 18, 2016 (UTC) "News From the Front" Should probably move to hist refs.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 10:18, October 2, 2016 (UTC) :Indeed. We can probably expand it a bit with some JS material. TR (talk) 15:10, October 2, 2016 (UTC) Miscellaneous State Governors of the United States (Fictional Work) Johnson was Governor pre-POD and not one during the course of any of the stories. Correct be if I am wrong, but it is my understanding that the cat is reserved for individuals who appear as a state governor in a work by Turtledove or were one post-POD. Therefore, I think this cat should not apply here. ML4E (talk) 19:14, November 17, 2016 (UTC) :That is correct. He was the military governor of Tennessee at the POD of M&S, so he shouldn't be in the miscellaneous state governors on that basis, either way. TR (talk) 19:29, November 17, 2016 (UTC) See Also: JFK See Talk:Bill Clinton. TR (talk) 18:49, February 11, 2017 (UTC) Expanded OTL I may have overdone the OTL section a bit, but I suspect he'll be relevant as POTUS in "Liberating Alaska", plus I felt it worthwhile to point out why he sucked. The impeachment was probably bogus, but his racism is emphatically worth calling out, especially now. TR (talk) 21:09, June 6, 2018 (UTC) :Lincoln's Loyalists by Richard Current offers a slightly kinder assessment. To wit, Lincoln had envisioned a reconstruction policy in which freedmen and white unionists would be encouraged to form an alliance powerful enough to dominate Southern politics. Johnson believed in this vision and accepted the VP nomination in order to support it. Then Lincoln died and Johnson didn't realize how light the Radicals' commitment to his vision really was. Of course Johnson lacked Lincoln's political genius and ability to lead difficult barely-allies to places where they'd rather not go; but then, so did everyone else. He perceived the Radicals as supporting only the freedmen and hanging the Union's white southern friends out to dry, and correctly predicted that this would push them into the Democratic camp, which would mean kowtowing to barely-reconstructed ex-Confeds. But even this was better than Radical Reconstruction, which offered no white southerner anything but a permanent recession. :So he sought to overcompensate. It didn't work very well. And one must be generous to credit his intentions as good. So I guess it's less of a kind reassessment than an effort to point out that it takes two to tango. Turtle Fan (talk) 19:26, June 7, 2018 (UTC) ::I have always understood that AJ simply did the best he could with what he had. Any POTUS, even a longer-lived Lincoln, would have found Reconstruction a Sisyphean task. But his negativity toward black people didn't help.JonathanMarkoff (talk) 21:30, June 7, 2018 (UTC)